Kate Harding has an interesting post up at Shakesville’s hurricane party HQ: according to an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, obese girls are more likely to skip college than are thinner girls:
Many obese girls skip college because of mental and behavior problems associated with their weight, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin has found.
According to a study published in the July issue of the journal Sociology of Education, obese adolescent girls are half as likely to go to college as are non-obese girls, and those who attended a high school where obesity was uncommon were even less likely to enroll.
The study, which tracked 11,000 teenagers, also found that obese teen girls were more likely to consider suicide, have negative self-images, and use alcohol and marijuana than their non-obese peers.
Ain’t that the truth.
I find this quite personally interesting. Senior year in high school, I was the heaviest I’ve ever been, over 300 pounds. A year or two earlier, I’d attempted suicide (which my parents just swept under the rug). Negative self-image? Hell, yeah. I was also only one of a handful of truly fat kids in school, and certainly the most outcast (I totally understand how it is that girls who aren’t the only obese ones in school would have an easier time with their self-images). Moving to town freshman year as a painfully-shy, already-obese kid with a horrendous family life didn’t help much, either. I really didn’t have any friends, though a couple of kids tried, and spent most of my time locked up in my room. I didn’t drink or do drugs at that point, in part because I was terrified of winding up like my father, a drunk. Plus, no friends.
Incidentally, I have a really hard time watching Heathers, as brilliant as that movie is. You see, I was Martha Dumptruck. They had that character down, except for the bit where she thought the guy really had written the note sincerely. No fat girl would ever fall for that.
But I was smart, and there was no question I was going to college (my family let me know that I was never going to have a man, so I’d better have some career ambitions). So, for me, skipping college wasn’t part of the program. In any event, it was the only way to get away from my dysfunctional family and leave behind a town I’d grown to hate from being tormented in school for my weight.
However, applying to college presented a few problems. I wouldn’t go anywhere that required a physical. I wouldn’t go anywhere that required a visit, or an interview. So that left UConn, where I’d figured I’d be winding up anyway due to family finances. And my older brother and sister were there, so there was at least somebody I knew, and I knew the campus well enough from picking up my homesick sister on weekends and driving her back.
She’ll probably kill me for revealing that. Sorry, Kat!
And once I got in, I didn’t go to orientation because I didn’t want to be the only fat girl there.
So I get there, and check into my dorm, and am still painfully shy. I was paired up with a junior who’d dropped some stuff before I’d met her and headed home for a few days. I peeked at her clothes, and to my dismay, they were smalls and mediums. But I met a few people, spent way more time socializing in a few days than I had the previous four years, and even met a few fat girls. And then my roommate, who’d lived in the dorm the previous year, showed up. And she was thin, blonde, busty, bubbly and pretty.
And one of the first things she asked me was whether I had a boyfriend. I was stunned. Here’s this pretty blonde asking *me* if *I* had a boyfriend, without hesitation! I didn’t, and she was relieved. Mostly because her previous roommate, a girl she knew from home (and who now lived down the hall), had pretty much moved her boyfriend into the room, where he slept at all hours and never left.
It meant a lot to me that she didn’t take one look at me and decide not to bother asking the question.
So, I had a pretty positive experience with college on the whole, where the fat hatred was far less obvious and overt than in high school. Would I have gone had I not been trying to escape a bad situation at home? I don’t know. Certainly, I limited my available options because of my weight, and missed out on more than a few experiences because of my self-loathing and fear of others’ reactions. And I also went through a fairly late and scary adolescence in a way when I lost a bunch of weight (less self-loathing and more exercise is good for you? Who knew?) and suddenly started getting male attention.
Here’s something Kate said about her surprise that the findings did not seem to correlate with class or income (the higher the income, the lower the incidence of obesity), in part because of the fact that obesity didn’t affect boys’ rates of school attendance, but being around other obese girls in high school did affect girls’ rates:
Note that girls who went to high schools where obesity was uncommon were even less likely to go to college. Statistically, it’s likely that obesity being uncommon = wealthier district. Wealthier district, in my experience = more emphasis on college prep and more pressure to go to college. Yet fat girls in these districts bow out of college even more often than girls in presumably less wealthy districts. You suppose that could have anything to do with them getting the message even more strongly that they’re unwanted outsiders who don’t belong in an educational environment?
I haven’t read the study yet, just this squib about it, but I have no reason to think the findings aren’t true — which kinda makes me want to barf. It takes a certain amount of self-confidence to leave home and go to college, and after surviving the snakepit of high school, not many adolescent fat girls are bursting with faith in their abilities and worth as human beings. And that’s without getting into the practical reasons not to go: that those who don’t commute will be forced to live closely — possibly in the same room — with fat-hating strangers instead of their families; that dining halls involve the opportunity for all sorts of strangers to observe your eating habits; that too many colleges have molded chair/desk combos that fat people can’t fit into comfortably or at all; that too many professors, being part of this culture, will assume that fat students are stupid and lazy.
And until this culture figures out that low self-esteem is not the result of being fat, but of being fucking tortured for being fat, I can’t say I have a lot of hope that this will change.
I don’t know how soon that’s going to happen, though. Certainly not when you have people screaming about breastfeeding your baby or it’ll get fat! And don’t work outside the home or your kid’ll get fat! And don’t be poor, or your kid’ll be fat! And don’t be a ‘tween, or you’ll be fat! And you have schools sending home obesity report cards even as they feed the kids funnel cakes and cut sports. And when you have people who think that fining parents for having fat kids is a capital idea.
Because fat kids aren’t stigmatized or monitored enough. Their quality of life is already at having-cancer level; let’s kick it up a notch.
Touching post. I had no idea you were ever fat, and in fact I have always pictured you looking like a Carrie Bradshaw type (as in, not only thin, but ultra-cool, designer clad, above-it-all New Yorker kind of thin). I guess you can’t make those kind of assumptions about people based on their blogs. I also thought Digby was a dude!
“And that’s without getting into the practical reasons not to go: that those who don’t commute will be forced to live closely — possibly in the same room — with fat-hating strangers instead of their families; that dining halls involve the opportunity for all sorts of strangers to observe your eating habits; that too many colleges have molded chair/desk combos that fat people can’t fit into comfortably or at all; that too many professors, being part of this culture, will assume that fat students are stupid and lazy.”
Not trying to discount the effects of our culture here, but I suspect that your experience was probably not all that strange and that UConn was not unusually fat-accepting, which makes the above that much more poignant: it’s likely that the above scenarios won’t happen to most of the fat girls who do attend college. College isn’t high school, but it’s hard to get high school students to understand that beyond, “You mean no one cares if I go to class or not?”
Egads, that hit home. As I am STILL struggling with weight, post-baby and at the ripe old age of 37, I felt alot of that article. I actually lost a ton of weight my senior year in college, and was at my fighting-weight for approximately two weeks in 1992.
Then I went to work, and sat at a desk. And working out twice a day whilst still getting good grades in senior “basket-weaving” classes, wasn’t happening. So, I gained the 10 pounds a year that they say you do when you don’t focus on being healthy. And I lost some for my wedding. And gained it back. And then got preggo. And then lost some and gained it, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
I smiled at the “breastfeed or your baby will be fat” thing. I do breastfeed. But so did my mother, and look at me. And the really ironic thing is that my munchkin lost so much weight right after he was born that the doctors, in the parlyzing fear that our litigious society places them, freaked out and demanded that I force feed my kid for a while. Imagine. Me, who has struggled with body image and weight my whole life, in a post-delivery hormonal haze, waking my baby up to force him to eat every two hours. And by waking him up, I mean stripping him down to his diaper and wiping him with a wet cloth because all he wanted to do was sleep!!!! Oh the angonizing irony. Of course, he dropped excess weight when he was born, down to the 50% where he has stayed for the past year, and is a very healthy healthy baby.
Ok, thanks for letting me vent. I do think that weight issues are sooooo complex, although the “solution” is always packaged so simply.
Right on. Appreciated your post.
Not trying to discount the effects of our culture here, but I suspect that your experience was probably not all that strange and that UConn was not unusually fat-accepting, which makes the above that much more poignant: it’s likely that the above scenarios won’t happen to most of the fat girls who do attend college. College isn’t high school, but it’s hard to get high school students to understand that beyond, “You mean no one cares if I go to class or not?”
Exactly. It’s that fear that college will just be more of the same that they were subjected in in high school that probably keeps fat girls from going to college. It’s probably also why the attendance rates are higher if they have other fat girls in high school — they can see that maybe those other girls are accepted by other students, and maybe they won’t stand out so much.
I agree. I was scared to death to go to college (which led to the freshman homesickness
) but once I got settled in I realized it was so much more accepting. I had really fought going, but I am so glad that I went… like you, Mom and Dad pushed me to go for the wrong reasons…. 1) You aren’t that smart so you’ll need a husband; and 2) Mom and I were butting heads on who was the queen of the house… I did a lot of the work, but she wanted the crown. So it was off to UConn I went.
I had been pudgy (not obese, but not thin) in high school, and terribly awkward. I ended up dropping weight in college for a variety of reasons. Primarily, I think, because I was away from the Evil Home Life. Also, for the first time, I was surrounded by girls who ate girl-size portions and also, no family-tyle eating. You ate what you were given. We had grown up with 4 brothers (big eaters) and with 6 kids in the house, there was much vying for food… if you didn’t eat quick, there was no way you would get seconds. Sort of created a hoarding mentality. I also found much more social acceptance in college. The social structure wasnt’ so black and white. In high school, I was so awkward, but in college it was easier to find your group.
Outsiders of all sorts get to wipe the slate clean when they go to college. And the need for hierarchy just isn’t that great at college, versus high school - college socializing breaks into groups, the Greek crowd, the geek crowd, the artsy set, dorm groups, LGBTAs, minorities, etc.